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Microsoft Learning Resources

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I started playing with the VHD files Microsoft provides. The exchange VHD had its own domain controller. I ran it on the Beta Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 and it seemed okay. I didn’t try it on Virtual PC 2007, but I was told it wouldn’t work by on the group at OWSUG’s study group. You’ll want Virtual Server for the ISA image as you will want a couple of virtual networks to test this out. The other thing they don’t tell you is you can extend the functionality of the VHD’s until March 2008 if you have Technet or MSDN. Simply put in the key from your subscription and the 30 day limit disappears. Again the same rules apply as though it was a technet trial.

 

I also started playing with the free elearning courses at Microsoft E-Learning site. These will be handy on the train tomorrow as I am in Toronto for work. So far I am about half way through the Vista and Office Business Deployment course. I want to try and get through these prior to the launch event.

Windows Vista User Profiles and moving Domains

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We moved to a new Windows 2003 domain to resolve the server issue from the last post. As part of the domain migration  I moved my Windows Vista RC1 machine from the old domain to the new domain. When I rebooted, I was able to login with the new domain administrator account. When I tried logging in as myself on the new domain I got the error "The user Profile Service failed the logon.  User profile cannot be loaded"" and it kicked me out. I saw a good article here, but unfortunately it didn’t help me any. I was able to login as my user on the old domain but when I tried logging in as the local machine admin, it was a no go but I never tried safe mode. In hindsight, I don’t know why I didn’t try that. I made the decision to nuke Vista and install XP again as I need it for QuarkXpress 6.5 to work.

Back to the last days issues, as soon as the first Domain Controller was up and going, I promoted a second server to a Domain Controller. I really don’t want a repeat of Friday’s events. With Windows 2003 R2, you can deploy printers through Group Policy. I found this pretty handy today as I didn’t need to run around and install printers on everyone’s computer. Using the printer manager console in R2, you can see all the printers in the domain which are attached to a server, (I haven’t tried local workstations yet) their status and whether or not they are deployed via GP. It was really slick rolling out these new print devices to the workstations. Technet has a great article on deploying them and you need to put a file into the startup script in GP as well.

My next project as part of this fiasco is to use Distributed File System to have multiple servers setup to provide increased availability of data. The data will be available through multiple server and be backed up to multiple machines . Once this is done, I’ll be a little happier as I know the servers will have some fault tolerance, redundancy and the network will be easier to maintain as the domain is organized into multiple OU’s now by department.

Shared Computer Toolkit and the Fall Time Change

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I arrived to work last Monday, normal day to start. I got a call around 2:00 in the afternoon from one of the larger library branches that the computers were constantly rebooting every hour and that the time was off by a bit. When I got there I found the machines showing somewhere between 2:00 – 3:00am, October 29, 2006.

Here is some information on the computers:

  • The computers were set to reboot for administrative purposes at 3:00am. This is the only time disk protection is turned off.
  • The computers are not part of a domain.
  • The computers update their clocks with time.windows.com once a week.

Here is what I figured was happening. The time change happened at 2:00am, EDT which put the time back to 1:00am EST. This change wasn’t noted to the operating system as disk protection was on.  At 3:00am, the machines reboot for maintenance. The computer reboots and the operating system, thinks it hasn’t changed the clock back so it does so at 3:00am, changing the time to 2:00am. Here is what I don’t quite understand, the rollback doesn’t seem to get written to disk. The machine reboots and shows 2:00am, October 29, 2006 and the time only syncs once a week so that never got corrected. In an hour at 3:00am the whole process repeats itself.  Dave who I car pool with to Ottawa for the study group with, commented it was like the movie Groundhog’s Day.

When someone does log on to the computer which was Monday, the time could not sync if it tried because the computer was out by a day. The date has to be correct in order for a time sync to happen.

Here is what I had to do to fix the problem.

  • Reboot the computer and clear any changes to the disk.
  • Log in as the toolkit admin and change disk protection to save changes on reboot.
  • Adjust the clock so the correct time and date were shown. Change the tab to Internet time and I changed the server to time.nrc.ca (National Research Council’s time server.) and synchronized.
  • Rebooted the computer
  • Changes were saved to disk and machine booted back up
  • Logged in again as toolkit admin to confirm changes were done correctly.

I suppose I didn’t have to change the time server to time.nrc.ca but it seems to sync faster and I might as well make use of the resources my tax dollars fund.  If you want to use it too, use time.nrc.ca in the Internet time field and don’t follow the instructions on National Research Council website to call the phone number.

As it turns out all the computers I rolled out using the toolkit all had the problem except for computers in one branch because they turned the computers off for the weekend. Their clocks were only out by an hour and the time sync fixed the time when it happened next.

Well I should be free of this problem in the spring, the time will only flip forward, which should fix the rebooting every hour issue. Before then though, I will be looking at adding a time sync script to the admin reboot process which should fix this problem. I still haven’t had an opportunity to play with Version 2 of the shared computer toolkit, so it might be fixed there too.